Gulag Archipelago Chapter 2 : The History of Our Sewage Disposal System
Chapter 2 continues to describe the bureaucracy that channeled citizens off to the Gulag. The tone is much the same as Chapter 1: a seemingly endless list of people and groups marked for disposal, following fast one on the other, interspersed with attempts to make sense of it all. The theme of parallel reality continues with the metaphor "sewage disposal system:" think a network of underground tunnels beneath the surface of ordinary life, mostly hidden and yet always present. Any minute, based on an often trivial activity in the present, or far in the past, or even for no reason at all, one might be designated "sewage" and disappear into the underground.
Solzhenitsyn begins the chapter by noting that the years 1937 and 1938 are noted for mass arrests, but that is mainly because the people arrested previously were mostly illiterate and therefore did not leave much evidence of themselves.
"Through the pipes the flow pulsed. Sometimes the pressure was higher than had been projected, sometimes lower. But the prison sewers were never empty. The blood, the sweat, and the urine into which we were pulped pulsed through them continuously. The history of this sewage system is the history of an endless swallow and flow; flood alternating with ebb and ebb again with flood; waves pouring in, some big, some small; brooks and rivulets flowing in from all sides; trickles oozing in through gutters; and then just plain individually scooped up droplets." (25)
So what could sweep you away into the sewer system? You might be part of a group that was marked for disposal (flood), perhaps a member of a family (brook and rivulet) or an individual who might seem to fit nowhere into the big picture at all (a droplet).
A chronological list follows. "Even before there was any civil war," writes Solzhenitsyn, "it could be seen that Russia, due to the make up of its population, was obviously not suited to any kind of socialism. It was too polluted." (26). "In his essay 'How to Organize the Competition' VI Lenin proclaimed the common, united purpose of 'purging the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects.'" (27) "Pollution", "insects" included: members of socialist parties/groups who assisted in Revolution, union members, drunkards and hooligans, members of cooperative movements/communes, teachers, intellectuals, engineers, peasant farmers, people who had lived abroad, students, anyone who followed organized religion, family members or friends of anyone in the previous categories, various ethnic groups.
"This whole operation was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed. It was essential to clear out, conscientiously, socialists of every other stripe from Moscow, Petrograd, the ports, the industrial centres, and later on, the outlying provinces as well. ....And without any noise, without any outcry, the members of all the other parties slipped gradually out of sight, lost all connection with the places and people where they and their revolutionary activities were known, and thus -- imperceptibly and mercilessly -- was prepared the annihilation of those who had once raged against tyranny at student meetings and clanked their Tsarist shackles in pride." (35-36)
The overall sense left by this chapter is again, that the "sewage disposal system" becomes unmoored from any rationalization a sane person could comprehend, and instead exists to feed itself on some toxic recipe of human evil and stupidity. I tried to describe this to my husband at one point, and he said: "So people were acting in their own selfish interest, instead of the greater good." Well yes....but no. For sure there were individuals who acted selfishly: perhaps it was to their advantage at the time to denounce their colleague or family member to the secret police. But how do you convince yourself that a society that systematically murders people, including the ones most needed to keep it functioning, is working "in your own interest", selfish or otherwise? I have to say I have no answer to this question at present, except that people somehow must become incapable of thinking rationally about their own interest. How this happens is a good question, and perhaps the rest of the chapter will provide some clues.
Having exhaustively (as exhaustively as he could, anyway) documented all the various groups and individuals caught up in the waves of arrests and sentences, Solzhenitsyn turns to the criminal code and goes through it point by point. A common theme is that any crime can be interpreted in the broadest possible terms. Conveniently, this allows the maximum amount of people to be found guilty. After a certain point, it must start to feel like most people are guilty by default.
Coincidentally, while I was reading this chapter, a friend posted on her Facebook page about Albert Einstein. Some travel journals of Einstein's had been recently published and in them he said some derogatory things about certain races, especially the Chinese. My friend did not think Einstein should be denounced based on these journals, and that rather he should be given credit for becoming a better person as he aged. However she is more forgiving than many I've encountered, especially on the internet. There are no shortage of people eager to condemn a person based on one thing they said (often out of context), or an association they have or once had. I was thinking of this as I read the following passage:
"But there was no section in Article 58 which was interpreted so broadly and with so ardent a revolutionary conscience as Section 10. Its definition was: 'Propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subverting or weakening of the Soviet power...and equally, the dissemination or possession of literary materials of similar content.' For this section in peacetime, a minimum penalty only was set (not any less! not too light!); no upper limit was set for the maximum penalty.
"Such was the fearlessness of the great power when confronted by the word of the subject.
"The famous extensions of this famous section were as follows: The scope of the 'agitation containing an appeal' was enlarged to include a face-to-face conversation between friends or even between a husband and wife, or a private letter. The word 'appeal' could mean personal advice. And we say 'could mean' because, in fact, it did.
"'Subverting and weakening' the government could include any idea which did not coincide with or rise to the level of intensity of the ideas expressed in the newspaper on any particular day. After all, anything which does not strengthen must weaken: Indeed, anything which does not completely fit in, coincide, subverts!
"'And he who sings not with us today
is against
us'
-Maykovsky
"The term 'preparation of literary materials' covered every letter, note, or private diary, even when only the original document existed." (pages 65-66)
There is no section 10-type law in any contemporary Western country, and yet this passage jumped right out at me. I am not concerned about the police taking notes about me, but I know there are a lot of people who look through social media, personal journals (see above), perhaps blogs (!) and other records looking for evidence of thought or speech "crimes." There is a certain kind of person that seems positively gleeful in discovering that Albert Einstein, or some other more boring person, is not sufficiently progressive.
If you are too caught up in an ideology, not only do you stop listening to criticism, but you actually see lack of enthusiastic support of those ideas as a threat. The politics are no longer linked to debate and persuasion, but to signalling conformity. Conformity is demanded of behaviour and speech first, but soon of association and even thought.
Consider this description of denunciation at a university:
"Nowhere was it specifically proscribed that more members of the intelligentsia should be arrested than other groups. But just as the intelligentsia had never been overlooked in previous waves, it was not neglected in this one. A student's denunciation (and this combination of words, "student" and "denunciation" had ceased to sound outlandish) that a certain lecturer in a higher educational institution kept citing Lenin and Marx frequently but Stalin not at all was all that was needed for the lecturer not to show up for lectures any more. And what if he cited no one? All Leningrad Orientalists of the middle and younger generation were arrested. The entire staff of the Institute of the North except for its NKVD informers, was arrested." (73)
What I would like to know is this: before conformity of thought and belief is written into the law, and enforced by police and arrests, how much support do you generally see for it among the general populace?
At one point Solzhenitsyn writes: "Should we wrap it up and simply say that they arrested the innocent?" But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and, at the beginning of the thirties, was defined as 'rightest opportunism.' So we can't even discuss these out of date concepts, guilt and innocence." (76)
I hope later in the book Solzhenitsyn elaborates on this elimination of guilt and innocence from social and legal consciousness, as I think it might hold the answers to some of the questions I have as I read. Also this section:
"The steady pulse of decrees led to a curious national pattern of violations and crimes. One could easily recognize that neither burglary, nor murder, nor samogon distilling, nor rape ever seemed to occur at random intervals or in random places throughout the country as a result of human weakness, lust, or failure to control one's passions. By no means! One detected, instead, a surprising unanimity and monotony in the crimes committed. The entire Soviet Union would be in a turmoil of rape alone, or murder alone, or samogon distilling alone, each in its turn--in sensitive reaction to the latest government decree. Each particular crime or violation seemed somehow to be playing into the hands of the latest decree so that it would disappear from the scene that much faster! At that precise moment, the particular crime which had just been foreseen, and for which wise new legislation had just provided stricter punishment, would explode simultaneously everywhere." (87)
It is hard to comprehend such a destructive force: and yet the reader is forced to, because it happened.
Solzhenitsyn begins the chapter by noting that the years 1937 and 1938 are noted for mass arrests, but that is mainly because the people arrested previously were mostly illiterate and therefore did not leave much evidence of themselves.
"Through the pipes the flow pulsed. Sometimes the pressure was higher than had been projected, sometimes lower. But the prison sewers were never empty. The blood, the sweat, and the urine into which we were pulped pulsed through them continuously. The history of this sewage system is the history of an endless swallow and flow; flood alternating with ebb and ebb again with flood; waves pouring in, some big, some small; brooks and rivulets flowing in from all sides; trickles oozing in through gutters; and then just plain individually scooped up droplets." (25)
So what could sweep you away into the sewer system? You might be part of a group that was marked for disposal (flood), perhaps a member of a family (brook and rivulet) or an individual who might seem to fit nowhere into the big picture at all (a droplet).
A chronological list follows. "Even before there was any civil war," writes Solzhenitsyn, "it could be seen that Russia, due to the make up of its population, was obviously not suited to any kind of socialism. It was too polluted." (26). "In his essay 'How to Organize the Competition' VI Lenin proclaimed the common, united purpose of 'purging the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects.'" (27) "Pollution", "insects" included: members of socialist parties/groups who assisted in Revolution, union members, drunkards and hooligans, members of cooperative movements/communes, teachers, intellectuals, engineers, peasant farmers, people who had lived abroad, students, anyone who followed organized religion, family members or friends of anyone in the previous categories, various ethnic groups.
"This whole operation was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed. It was essential to clear out, conscientiously, socialists of every other stripe from Moscow, Petrograd, the ports, the industrial centres, and later on, the outlying provinces as well. ....And without any noise, without any outcry, the members of all the other parties slipped gradually out of sight, lost all connection with the places and people where they and their revolutionary activities were known, and thus -- imperceptibly and mercilessly -- was prepared the annihilation of those who had once raged against tyranny at student meetings and clanked their Tsarist shackles in pride." (35-36)
The overall sense left by this chapter is again, that the "sewage disposal system" becomes unmoored from any rationalization a sane person could comprehend, and instead exists to feed itself on some toxic recipe of human evil and stupidity. I tried to describe this to my husband at one point, and he said: "So people were acting in their own selfish interest, instead of the greater good." Well yes....but no. For sure there were individuals who acted selfishly: perhaps it was to their advantage at the time to denounce their colleague or family member to the secret police. But how do you convince yourself that a society that systematically murders people, including the ones most needed to keep it functioning, is working "in your own interest", selfish or otherwise? I have to say I have no answer to this question at present, except that people somehow must become incapable of thinking rationally about their own interest. How this happens is a good question, and perhaps the rest of the chapter will provide some clues.
Having exhaustively (as exhaustively as he could, anyway) documented all the various groups and individuals caught up in the waves of arrests and sentences, Solzhenitsyn turns to the criminal code and goes through it point by point. A common theme is that any crime can be interpreted in the broadest possible terms. Conveniently, this allows the maximum amount of people to be found guilty. After a certain point, it must start to feel like most people are guilty by default.
Coincidentally, while I was reading this chapter, a friend posted on her Facebook page about Albert Einstein. Some travel journals of Einstein's had been recently published and in them he said some derogatory things about certain races, especially the Chinese. My friend did not think Einstein should be denounced based on these journals, and that rather he should be given credit for becoming a better person as he aged. However she is more forgiving than many I've encountered, especially on the internet. There are no shortage of people eager to condemn a person based on one thing they said (often out of context), or an association they have or once had. I was thinking of this as I read the following passage:
"But there was no section in Article 58 which was interpreted so broadly and with so ardent a revolutionary conscience as Section 10. Its definition was: 'Propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subverting or weakening of the Soviet power...and equally, the dissemination or possession of literary materials of similar content.' For this section in peacetime, a minimum penalty only was set (not any less! not too light!); no upper limit was set for the maximum penalty.
"Such was the fearlessness of the great power when confronted by the word of the subject.
"The famous extensions of this famous section were as follows: The scope of the 'agitation containing an appeal' was enlarged to include a face-to-face conversation between friends or even between a husband and wife, or a private letter. The word 'appeal' could mean personal advice. And we say 'could mean' because, in fact, it did.
"'Subverting and weakening' the government could include any idea which did not coincide with or rise to the level of intensity of the ideas expressed in the newspaper on any particular day. After all, anything which does not strengthen must weaken: Indeed, anything which does not completely fit in, coincide, subverts!
"'And he who sings not with us today
is against
us'
-Maykovsky
"The term 'preparation of literary materials' covered every letter, note, or private diary, even when only the original document existed." (pages 65-66)
There is no section 10-type law in any contemporary Western country, and yet this passage jumped right out at me. I am not concerned about the police taking notes about me, but I know there are a lot of people who look through social media, personal journals (see above), perhaps blogs (!) and other records looking for evidence of thought or speech "crimes." There is a certain kind of person that seems positively gleeful in discovering that Albert Einstein, or some other more boring person, is not sufficiently progressive.
If you are too caught up in an ideology, not only do you stop listening to criticism, but you actually see lack of enthusiastic support of those ideas as a threat. The politics are no longer linked to debate and persuasion, but to signalling conformity. Conformity is demanded of behaviour and speech first, but soon of association and even thought.
Consider this description of denunciation at a university:
"Nowhere was it specifically proscribed that more members of the intelligentsia should be arrested than other groups. But just as the intelligentsia had never been overlooked in previous waves, it was not neglected in this one. A student's denunciation (and this combination of words, "student" and "denunciation" had ceased to sound outlandish) that a certain lecturer in a higher educational institution kept citing Lenin and Marx frequently but Stalin not at all was all that was needed for the lecturer not to show up for lectures any more. And what if he cited no one? All Leningrad Orientalists of the middle and younger generation were arrested. The entire staff of the Institute of the North except for its NKVD informers, was arrested." (73)
What I would like to know is this: before conformity of thought and belief is written into the law, and enforced by police and arrests, how much support do you generally see for it among the general populace?
At one point Solzhenitsyn writes: "Should we wrap it up and simply say that they arrested the innocent?" But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and, at the beginning of the thirties, was defined as 'rightest opportunism.' So we can't even discuss these out of date concepts, guilt and innocence." (76)
I hope later in the book Solzhenitsyn elaborates on this elimination of guilt and innocence from social and legal consciousness, as I think it might hold the answers to some of the questions I have as I read. Also this section:
"The steady pulse of decrees led to a curious national pattern of violations and crimes. One could easily recognize that neither burglary, nor murder, nor samogon distilling, nor rape ever seemed to occur at random intervals or in random places throughout the country as a result of human weakness, lust, or failure to control one's passions. By no means! One detected, instead, a surprising unanimity and monotony in the crimes committed. The entire Soviet Union would be in a turmoil of rape alone, or murder alone, or samogon distilling alone, each in its turn--in sensitive reaction to the latest government decree. Each particular crime or violation seemed somehow to be playing into the hands of the latest decree so that it would disappear from the scene that much faster! At that precise moment, the particular crime which had just been foreseen, and for which wise new legislation had just provided stricter punishment, would explode simultaneously everywhere." (87)
It is hard to comprehend such a destructive force: and yet the reader is forced to, because it happened.
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